Twitter to unveil new metrics to show wider reach: WSJ

Twitter to unveil new metrics to show wider reach: WSJ

Reuters

Twitter Inc, which has been struggling to revive flagging user growth, is expected to introduce new metrics to show that its microblogging service has a wider audience who may not necessarily be logged in to their accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company, which went public in November, is expected to launch four new metrics when it reports second-quarter earnings on July 29, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The shift is aimed at changing Twitter's perception as a social network to something similar to Google Inc's YouTube, whose videos are often accessed through other sites.

Tweets are often embedded on other sites or are shown scrolling on television screens, but the company's current metrics do not take those audience into account.

Twitter currently measure its reach using traditional metrics such as monthly active users, monthly unique visitors and timeline views.

The company may now reveal details of how users interact with tweets, including the number of people clicking on links, or those favoriting or retweeting messages, according to the Journal.
Twitter has reported lackluster user and usage growth for the last couple of quarters and its stock price has nearly halved in the last six months.

The company named Anthony Noto as chief financial officer in July, putting a former Goldman Sachs executive who led its IPO last year in charge of its finances.

Twitter's Chief Operating Officer Ali Rowghani departed last month after clashing with Chief Executive Dick Costolo over whether he should continue to oversee product innovation.
Twitter declined to comment on the Journal story.

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Demi Lovato Being Recplaced?

After taylor swift and selena friendship ended it looked like she was getting closer to Demi Lovato. But after her longtime friend unfollowed her on Twitter, we're not so sure their friendship is on stable ground — and Selena might be replacing Demi! She has been strengthening her friendship with  singer JoJo.

While the two have been in the same crowd for a couple of years, Jojo recently posted a photo of them hanging out alone, along with the caption, “Terrorizing the streets. Random nights to remember."

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One Direction's New Makeup Line:

Fans were already excited to see One Direction's new makeup collection when Niall Horan tweeted out a pic of himself trying out the new colors, but now that we've seen the first pics of the actual products

There are three sets in the new line, and each one is named after one of 1D's albums: Midnight Memories, Up All Night, and Take Me Home. Both the colors and metal tin packaging are really edgy and cool. Plus, individual products in the sets were named using their song titles, like "C'mon C'mon" eyeshadow!

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Nintendo's New Series 'The Cat Mario Show' is Here!

Original programming from Netflix,Hulu, and Amazon are all the rage right now. It’s all people talk about, and we have a feeling they’re onto something, because Nintendo is now jumping on the content craze with a brand new series featuring your favorite characters!

The Cat Mario Show was released today by Nintendo. It features puppet versions of Mario and Peach as they dish out details on your favorite games, offer up tips, and reveal some hidden secrets. You can download the first episode of The Cat Mario Show from the Nintendo eShop right now - check it out today!

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Louis Tomlinson Is Heartbroken Over Failed Soccer Deal

The One Directionsinger won't be able to purchase his hometown soccer team, the Doncaster Rovers — and he is heartbroken about it.

While reports surfaced that Louis' misbehavior put his purchase in jeopardy, it turns out that the deal isn't going forward for other reasons. Earlier this year, Louis announced that he was working on a deal to take over the team along with businessman John Ryan. They launched a crowdfunding campaign, but it apparently wasn't successful enough.

We know how much Louis was looking forward to owning his hometown team, especially because he's such a big fan. Even though Louis is majorly disappointed, he says that he still loves the team, and wants to do anything that he can to support it.

"My passion for Doncaster Rovers remains as strong as ever, and I hope that I can still be involved with the club moving forward!" he said. "And to all the Doncaster Rovers fans, I will do all in my power to help the club succeed. I really do love the club!"

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Software can decode bird songs

Software can decode bird songs

By Claire Marshall

BBC News 

Scientists have developed a highly advanced bird song decoder, which can automatically identify the call of a vast variety of birds.

The software brings the "cracking of the dawn chorus" one step closer.

It used recordings of individual birds and of dawn choruses to identify the characteristics of each tweet.
Dr Dan Stowell is lead author of the report, which was published in the Journal PeerJ.

He told the BBC: "Given a set of recordings, each of them with a list of the bird species present, I was able to 'train' a computer system by showing it these labelled examples."

This technique is called "feature-learning", which is an automatic analysis technique, used alongside a classification algorithm.
According to the report, this automatically learned data can "often outperform" manually compiled information.

The songs of hundreds of birds were analysed, including samples from the British Library Sound Archive. The best results were gathered from the biggest dataset ever gathered: Brazilian recordings of more than 500 single birds.

Dr Stowell said: "Birdsong is extremely complex. The simplest sounds are often the most difficult, because they can sound so alike."

He believes that existing software doesn't work well because it's not specific enough. This piece of work has found that bird sound classification is possible at a very large scale.
"If you go out in to a forest and want to know what you hear, there are hundreds of possible results. Now we are closer to having an app that can really let us do that."

Dr Stowell is now working on technology that can do even more than just identify the bird. He wants to try to decode the actual relationships between them. By analysing the call of a species of goldfinch, he is close to working out which birds are in pairs - just by their sound.

The tool has implications for the understanding of different areas, including ecology and conservation. It may also help our understanding of the human voice. "The sound of humans and birds are two completely separately evolved systems,' said Dr Stowell.

"But they do very similar things. For example chicks learn how to tweet from older birds, and in parallel children learn to speak by learning from adults."
An interesting consequence of this is that birds have regional accents. "Skylarks can recognise local birds and ones that have come from further away by the vocals they have learned."

However, Dr Stowell acknowledges that there is still some way to go. The researchers weren't able to make much significant progress on identifying all the birds singing in the dawn chorus.
"This is very complicated. It's a very difficult but interesting problem. And this brings us one step closer." 

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Next-generation iPhone to enter mass production this month

Next-generation iPhone to enter mass production this month

Reuters 

TAIPEI - Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronic goods, will begin mass production of Apple Inc's next-generation iPhone this month, local media reported Friday.

Mass production of a 4.7-inch successor to the wildly popular iPhone 5 series of smartphones will begin during the third week of July, Taiwan's Economic Daily News said, without citing sources. Production of a 5.5-inch version will begin during the second week of August, it said.

A separate report issued Thursday by a China state-run news service said Hon Hai is planning to hire 100,000 workers at its mainland facilities to meet future demand for the gadget, citing comments made by the chief of the Henan Provincial Commerce Department.

Fellow Taiwanese contract manufacturer Pegatron Corp this month also began recruitment of over 10,000 workers for its mainland facilities to manufacture the phone, according to the Economic Daily News report.
Hon Hai had no comment on the report. Representatives for Pegatron and the Henan Provincial Commerce Department could not immediately be reached for comment.

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Nelson Mandela International Day

 Nelson Mandela International Day:

It's Nelson Mandela International Day, a day of service celebrated on July 18, Mandela's birthday.

Mandela, the former president of South Africa and Nobel Peace Price recipient, died at 95 on Dec. 5, 2013. This is the first time the day has been celebrated since his death.

The day was unanimously approved in 2009 by the U.N. General Assembly. It was created to honor Mandela and inspire others to carry on his efforts to "take responsibility for making the world a better place, one small step at a time," according to a statement from the Nelson Mandela Foundation Initiative.

Mandela once said, "Real leaders must be ready to sacrifice all for the freedom of their people." His words offered hope and inspiration to millions.

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Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a hacker? Superman tops toxic superhero list

Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a hacker? Superman tops toxic superhero list

Samuel Gibbs

Guardian News 

Superman is the most likely superhero to inadvertently lure users to be hacked in as little as one click, claims security company McAfee.

The Man of Steel tops the list of “most toxic superheroes” for 2014, closely followed by Marvel’s Thor and DC’s Wonder Woman.

“While searching for your favourite superheroes online might seem innocent at the time, we need to remember that cyber criminals take advantage of their popularity to target unsuspecting consumers seeking more information,” Raj Samani, chief technical officer for McAfee said in a statement. “These criminals want to lure us into unsafe sites that can severely infect computers and devices, and steal personal data.”
McAfee found that searching for “Superman”, “Superman free torrent download”, “Superman watch”, “Superman free app”, or “Superman online” were the most likely superhero searches to land users on a site that could infect their computer with spyware, viruses or other malware, or attempted to steal user data.

Top 10 ‘toxic’ superheroes

1. Superman, 16.50%
2. Thor, 16.35%
3. Wonder Woman + Aquaman (tie) 15.70%
4. Wolverine, 15.10%
5. Spiderman, 14.70%
6. Batman, 14.20%
7. Black Widow, 13.85%
8. Captain America, 13.50%
9. Green Lantern, 11.25%
10. Ghost Rider, 10.83%

Superman’s profile was raised by the recent movies, while Thor’s movies and his involvement in the Marvel’s Avengers film made them attractive targets for criminals hoping to capture unsuspecting users. Wonder Woman and Aquaman are the only outliers here.

The super-powered heroine had a TV show in the 1970s and a pilot for a reboot in 2011, which did not lead to a new show. She is expected to appear in the upcoming Batman v Superman film, which is not scheduled for release until 2016, while Wonder Woman might have her own movie at some stage.
Aquaman on the other hand had a TV movie in 2006, and is also expected to make some sort of appearance in the new Superman movie alongside Wonder Woman. Why that makes them targets for cybercriminals is unclear.

No such thing as a free lunch

Users searching for pirated content are frequent targets of online criminals. Superheroes have become big business as Hollywood, games developers and TV producers have taken them in and turned them into multi-million dollar franchises.
The advice to users is simple. Be careful what you click on, check the web address of links before following them and when somewhere offers something that’s usefully expensive for free it’s normally too good to be true.

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Google's Street View takes on America's gas leaks

Google's Street View takes on America's gas leaks

By Edward McAllister

Reuters 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc's Street View cars have captured the world's roads, highways and back alleys for years. Now they are being used for something entirely different: detecting the thousands of natural gas leaks blighting major U.S. cities.

Google cars fit with air monitors have taken millions of readings along the streets of Boston, New York and Indianapolis over the past two years as part of a program run by the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund to help reduce methane emissions.

The results, announced by the fund on Wednesday, reveal how common leaks are in highly populated areas that until now have not been quantified. In central Boston, leaks were discovered every few blocks.
While the leaks were small and did not appear hazardous, they have prompted concerns about methane whose global warming impact is 20 times greater than carbon dioxide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The leaks also raise questions about the safety of old pipelines carrying natural gas in growing volumes across North America.

A natural gas pipeline leak caused an explosion in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem in March this year, leveling two buildings and killing eight people.

The data, collected through air analysis systems, showed thousands of leaks in areas like Boston and New York's Staten Island that rely on older, corroded cast iron pipelines. But in Indianapolis, where newer, plastic pipes have been installed, almost no leaks were detected.

"Until now, these smaller leaks have not been a priority in most places. Yet we can see from these maps just how much they can add up," Mark Brownstein, EDF chief counsel for natural gas, said in a statement.
Methane leaks have previously been detected, but this new method, which involved 15 million readings taken over thousands of miles, revealed the volume of gas leaking in each area, said EDF's chief scientist, Steven Hamburg. It could be a step to detecting total methane emissions from a given city, he said.

The EDF said other cities will be added to the program, but did not elaborate.

The findings come as President Obama makes carbon emissions a key issue of his second term.
U.S. production of natural gas, which is mostly methane, is on the rise due to a drilling boom. The network of pipelines carrying the fuel is expanding rapidly.

"This kind of technology and data offers valuable insights," said Susan Fleck, vice president of pipeline safety for National Grid, which supplies Boston and was also involved in the study.

"We are taking action, accelerating natural gas pipeline replacement to reduce leaks."

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BlackBerry announces virtual assistant to take on Siri and Cortana

BlackBerry announces virtual assistant to take on Siri and Cortana

Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, Google's got Now voice search and BlackBerry... doesn't have a virtual assistant of any kind. This morning, however, the Canadian smartphone maker confirmed that it has one in the works and will be showing up on the company's next major release.

Known aptly as BlackBerry Assistant, the new program is a part of OS 10.3 and will be available on the upcoming Passport phone. Assistant is voice-activated and comes with quite a few of the standard features we've come to expect on the other mobile platforms, such as the ability to open apps, send messages and tweets, set reminders and change settings.

It also is smart enough to learn and adapt to your needs, so it theoretically should become more useful over time as it gets to know you.
BlackBerry isn't revealing all that Assistant can do yet, and it hasn't offered a firm timeframe for availability aside from the fact that it'll be part of the Passport, but so far we haven't seen much to set it apart from the competition. It's at least a good sign that the company is trying remain competitive, however.

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Google is recruiting Glass converts with free demos

Google is recruiting Glass converts with free demos

Cassandra Khaw

The Verge

CNET reports that Google sent out emails on Wednesday inviting the public to "sit down with a Glass Guide" and partake in a first-hand experience of the company's futuristic Google Glass headset. Those interested will need to schedule appointments at one of the "Basecamps" — service centers for Google Glass — located in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Prospective buyers are allowed to bring a second person, so long as their companion is older than 13.

Google Glass is currently available in the United Kingdom and the US, although it should be noted that the product is still in open beta.

 The $1,500 wearable device is still being tweaked on multiple fronts, with a modified version featuring double the original amount of RAM announced late last month. Google is also working on making Glass more visually appealing, going as far as partnering with fashion icon Diane von Furstenberg to produce more stylish alternatives. It is currently unknown if Furstenberg's designs will be included in demo sessions. Glass's four-digit price tag remains a deterrent for a majority of the general populace, but a commitment-free test drive might be what it takes to persuade those who are on the fence

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